Back in the “roaring Napster” era, there were millions of people waiting online, at any given hour of the day, waiting to exchange files with you. Now, you’ll be lucky if there are several thousand.

So what happened?

Basically, the major music labels decided they were sick and tired of losing billions of dollars to people who chose to rip off their artist’s music. Musical piracy is just not cool, and people started to catch on to this new idea.

Lawsuits started, aimed at getting high profile news attention to hopefully discourage young people to stop using peer to peer services. And the efforts paid off.

Today, itunes and other legal places to download free music thrive and make a profit at selling high quality, relatively inexpensive downloads.

What about the rest? Have all the free music download sites really disappeared?

Check around the internet, and you will soon see the answer before you.